Karim Vaes

If you want the syntax highlighting to work with Vim on Ubuntu, then simply install the vim-full package:

sudo apt-get install vim-full

Edit the /etc/vim/vimrc file and uncomment (remove the following line

syntax on

Easy as that… (all you need is a few minutes and a bit of bandwith to download the packages)

A proof of concept for a local root exploit to hack linux kernels between version 2.6.17 and 2.6.24.1 has been released by ‘milw0rm’. I guess I won’t be the only one who says “feck…” to this.

$ gcc exploit.c -o exploit
$ whoami
heikki
$ ./exploit
———————————–
Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit
By qaaz
———————————–
[+] mmap: 0×0 .. 0×1000
[+] page: 0×0
[+] page: 0×20
[+] mmap: 0×4000 .. 0×5000
[+] page: 0×4000
[+] page: 0×4020
[+] mmap: 0×1000 .. 0×2000
[+] page: 0×1000
[+] mmap: 0xb7d90000 .. 0xb7dc2000
[+] root
$ whoami
root
Kernel 2.6.22-14-generic

References:
LKML
milw0rm.com
Launchpad
Debian Bugs

The GNU/Linux kernel, version 2.6.23, comes with a modular scheduler core and a Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS), which is implemented as a scheduling module. If you’re interested in the workings of this scheduler, be sure to check out the following article at DevWorks. Below you can find an excerpt of the article, which is in my opinion the core of the article.

How CFS works
The CFS scheduler uses an appeasement policy that guarantees fairness. As a task gets into the runqueue, the current time is recorded, and while the process waits for the CPU, its wait_runtime value gets incremented by an amount depending on the number of processes currently in the runqueue. The priority values of different tasks are also considered while doing these calculations. When this task gets scheduled to the CPU, its wait_runtime value starts decrementing and as this value falls to such a level that other tasks become the new left-most task of the red-black tree and the current one gets preempted. This way CFS tries for the ideal situation where wait_runtime is zero!

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue
If you’re using an icon theme other than the default for Ubuntu causes OpenOffice to have no icons in the menus or on the toolbars, causing the toolbars actually have the tooltip text as the button’s text (example: Export to PDF, Print File Directly, Spellcheck, etc).

Workaround
Install the “openoffice.org-style-default” package, which installs the “openoffice.org-style-andromeda” package.
OR: Use the default Human theme for Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-style-default

References
Ubuntu forums
Launchpad

This post is meant to share a small trick that I often use when installing linux on unknown systems. In my opinion, one of the biggest downsides in linux is setting up your monitor. Imagine starting out with linux, cause you hear it was great, installed it… and got an ugly looking desktop because the Xorg.conf is has the default properties.

Then you have a lot of evangelists saying you can perfectly calculate these values, but the thing that pops into my mind at this point is “user friendliness”.

A lot of things said to come down to the trick:

• Download knoppix
• Burn/mount it, so you can boot from it
• Boot your desktop/laptop with the knoppix live-cd.
• Backup the Xorg.conf file
• Boot your main linux distro (cfr. Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora, RedHat, Debian, … whatever)
• Backup your original Xorg.conf file
• Restore the Xorg.conf file from the Knoppix generated one
• Tweak it to your preferences

A additional & simple step that might ease up things for you…